Stylish New Yorkers are so cool you almost nod off

Cool isn't as cool as it used to be: The Strokes

Michael Deacon

12:01AM GMT 26 Jan 2006

Michael Deacon reviews the Strokes at the Shepherds Bush Empire

Is everything OK with Julian Casablancas? The Strokes singer has never been famed for sprightliness at gigs - generally he looks like a slouching schoolgirl who's stayed up long past bedtime the night before, and not because she was doing her homework.

But, at this first show of his band's UK tour, he looked so dozy you could probably have performed major heart surgery on him without his feeling it.

When not clinging to the microphone stand, he shambled groggily about the stage. During instrumental breaks, he puffed his cheeks out in a daze, lank curtains of hair flapping about his chops like a beagle's ears.

One of his few intelligible remarks was: "I think the bartender's got the best seat in the house." Perhaps it was just jet lag. Or perhaps - and these five New Yorkers are nothing if not effortlessly stylish - this was a special new level of "chilled": so cool you almost nod off.

But cool isn't as cool as it used to be. Look at Arctic Monkeys: clothes by Top Man, hair by Dennis the Menace, skin by Adrian Mole. But they have a live show that blazes with so much energy, the government should consider the band as a workable alternative to nuclear power.

Something even a performance as offhand-looking as this couldn't bury, however, was that the Strokes have some truly special songs.

Their three albums - Is This It, Room on Fire and the recently released First Impressions of Earth - have followed the same pattern: four or five tracks so exhilarating it's as if someone's snapped crocodile clips to your earlobes, and another handful to which you just shrug, as if you were, well, Julian Casablancas.

But run all the exciting ones together and you've got a set list so stuffed with instant pop melodies it's like a one-band rendering of a Now That's What I Call Music compilation. Here we had a frenetic Juicebox, a delirious Last Nite, a feral Reptilia. That's how they sounded, at any rate; you certainly couldn't read such vitality in the expressions of the men nonchalantly playing them.

Like the new album, the gig went on a little too long: even the encore took six songs. This seemed to surprise Casablancas, who had drawled the band's goodbyes before the fourth.

The first track on First Impressions of Earth is called You Only Live Once. Here, Casablancas looked as if he'd be happy to get his one life over with as quickly as possible.